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Newberry - Bane's continued


It would have been a long wait if we cooked each thing one at a time. Betty suggested we pool everything, cook it all at once, then divide it. You can imagine what a mess it was: we had soup, chili, canned peaches, and I don't remember what all, but it was all poured into the same pot. There wasn't any extra water to put into it because all the surplus water, except what was needed for the lights, had gone to make coffee. Betty had to pour some of the coffee in to lighten the mixture. The next problem she had was that the only spoon she had was a plastic one like you use for ice cream, and the mixture by this time had reached a depth greater than the length of the spoon! The only way she could stir the bottom to keep it from sticking and burning was to stick her whole muddy hand in it too. Well, the result was indescribably delicious! Sometime later when they were home, Larry asked her if she remembered the ingredients, because it was sooo good he wanted to try it again. She tried to remember what all had gone in it, and tried to duplicate it, but somehow it just didn't taste the same. She said probably it was because she didn't know how much mud to add. But I have a feeling that hunger has a lot to do with it.

Leaving to go home, all the others were heading toward Blacksburg, and I was going south to Wytheville. I stopped at the farmer's house to let him know we were out. It was a cold night -oooh boy. When we were climbing out one person put his hand on a rock and his fingers stuck to the rock. At the farmer's house, his wife had been trying to mop the floor, and the mop had stuck to the floor which was now like a skating rink! Got down to nine degrees below zero that night. They wanted me to spend the night when they saw how tired I was. But I knew that if I sat down, I wouldn't be able to get up again. I decided I would head home.

On longer trips I never felt like that when I came out; it was nervous tension of that first trip. Driving home I literally couldn't focus or anything, and steered the car by driving with two wheels off the pavement, pressed against the edge of the cement to tell where the road was. I crept over the mountain and back to Wytheville at about ten miles per hour. When I got back to my apartment on the second floor, I had to creep up the stairs on my hands and knees. It was about 3:00 AM which wasn't really late, since most of our trips were longer than that. I set the alarm so I could be at work at nine and slept pretty soundly. When I woke up, it was noon! Hadn't heard the alarm obviously. But the thing was, it wasn't noon or Monday, it was noon on Wednesday; I put in for sick leave! Caving never affected me that bad before or after.

There's one place in there where you have to turn your imagination off. It's a place where the floor suddenly disappears from a narrow passage and you have to cross that portion of it by sitting with your hips braced on one side of the wall and your feet on the other side and just wiggle sideways. That isn't too bad, but when you get to the end, there isn't really anything to grab hold of to pull your feet back up to where the rest of you is. We used to tell people that the hole was about twelve feet deep and to be careful; they'd get hurt if they fell. Of course the truth was that it is about 160 feet deep but if they knew that they'd more likely get hurt.

There was a time when Larry nearly got badly hurt in that cave. He took a group in that weren't too experienced. He went in, and went down the entrance drop ahead of everyone. I guess with so many years of experience without an accident he did a thing he knew better than to do. He stood at the bottom of the ladder, and said, "Who's coming down next?" Well, there were loose rocks up above, and the movement of the next person on the ladder dislodged a rock the size of a baseball which hit Larry square in the mouth. We didn't know about this until later because he didn't want to upset the new cavers. It broke off his two front teeth. He waited until everyone was down, and then asked Bill Cuddington if he would go with him to try to find a dentist in case he got dizzy from the loss of blood. Even though it was Sunday, they found a dentist who could take care of it. Later he said that maybe it was a lucky thing to have happened because he'd been getting so overconfident. Next time it could be a rock much bigger and smash his whole head. He started being ultra-careful again.

CUDDINGTON: So many other trips transpired there. I would take people in there, and they would take other people there. We always hoped to connect Penley with Newberry, but we never managed to do that. Maybe some of the modern cavers will be able to do that. Meantime on these trips I would generally rappel down that well, and the rest of the people would go down the Staircase. continued

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